


To Build Mastery

by dancinbutterfly



Category: Reign (TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Female-Centric, Female-centric sex, Misses Clause Challenge, POV Female Character, Slut Shaming, Yuleporn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:35:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kenna is a master of the ways of lovemaking but she wonders about her husband - if he wants her to be, if he is one himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Build Mastery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Thank you to Lan and Leaping Sonata for getting me through this. I hope you like it. I did the very best I could.

Bash doesn’t ask where her skills come from. He has said that he never wants her to think of another lover and Kenna can understand that. Henry was his father, after all. But Henry had taught her everything she knows in the bed chamber and she knows, well, perhaps one could say that she knows a great deal. People who do say that though, never speak kindly.

“Would that be wanton to say that I am wise in the ways of love?” she asks Mary one day. She is sprawled across her queen’s bed, watching her write. Greer sits on the floor with her needle point, something charming and chaste for Lord Castleroy. She had no part in this mess of love and lovemaking yet - to say nothing of Lola and her royal bastard.

Before Kenna can castigate herself for the ill thought, Mary laughs. “Not if you word it that way and not when you speak to me. I imagine outside these rooms it could be considered a bit…” she clears her throat and rubs her neck with her quill. Francis has left a rather sizable bite just beneath her collar. Kenna can tell from the way she worries it. “Untoward, rather than anything else.”

That was Mary-speak for _’Of course you’re not ruined, Kenna. Shame on you for thinking that of yourself.’_ It holds no power, but Mary believes it, and so it helps. Mary always helps.

“It seems ridiculous that something that yields such tremendous pleasure is so forbidden,” Kenna grumbles for the thousandth time and of course Mary laughs again. Mary is in particularly good spirits. Then again, a maid found her in Francis’s lap on the throne in nothing but her shift last night. That sort of thing would put anyone in a good mood.

Kenna can’t help but remember a bit fondly what it was like to make love to a king. She misses being passionate and seen as a lady of renown for it, instead of as a slut. 

But King Henry is gone, Francis rules the kingdom, and she has a Master of Horse and Hound for a husband. It’s… well. It’s not the life she imagined. 

The title isn’t that far off, though. Bash is built like a prize stallion and that very first time, when they fell into each other after weeks of marriage, he pulled her astride him and whispered, “Ride, Mistress of Horse and Hound. Ride.” He’d laughed and his blue eyes had crinkled at the corners. Kenna had stared down at him, shocked. 

Before Bash, Kenna was used to being taken. Henry was a generous lover but he was the lord of her body when she was beneath him. Once, Henry had, without permission or pretense, turned her on her stomach, pulled her up on her knees and fucked her like the hounds Bash now mastered. He’d fisted his hand in his hair like the reigns of a horse and pulled. She came screaming, her fingers digging into the mattress of his great bed. 

With Bash, she had been surprised to find none of his father’s dominance in his touch. That first night they made love, how he’d surprised her with his leashed physical power and his length and most of all how he never did more than gently touch her, fingertips gliding over her stomach, hips, breasts, collarbone, and face as she rode him to her own orgasm. After, when she could feel him still hard she began to move again but he stopped her with a hand on her hip. 

“Stop if you’re finished. I can take care of myself.”

“No,” she’d breathed, rocking on him like the waves that had taken her from Scotland to France. “No.” She had taken his seed and his pleasure by force and Bash had surrendered with grace without a word about how she knew how to do so.

She decides to bring the question to him that night, after Mary has been undressed for bed and delivered giggling to her king’s bedchamber. Kenna smiles at the way Francis does not even wait for the door to close before taking her into his arms, and pulls it shut for them.

Then she retreats to her own rooms and takes down her hair. Moments like this, she misses Pascal. The boy had been sweet and kind and hers and in the dark hours when she isn’t distracted by her duties, she remembers him, on the other side of a door, dying alone. 

It shouldn’t, but it makes her wonder about her own future, how it will unfold, if she and Bash will have a dozen children or if she will be the next to die on a cold floor inches from love.

When Bash comes in, he kisses her neck, her jaw, and before he can kiss her mouth she asks, “Is it because you still think I am your father’s whore that you never take me?”

That freezes him in place. They’re in a fight now. Poor Bash, she thinks. She did catch him off guard.

“When have I ever said-“

“You don’t have to. No one has to. Everyone knows who I am, what I am. They might as well call you master of horse, hound and whore for the way you touch me.”

His jaw tightens. “You love the way I touch you. Unless you’ve been lying to me when you wake me up in the night to beg for it. ‘Please Bash.’”

“Shut up.”

“‘Please fill me, Bash. You make other lovers a memory. I need you inside me,’” he parrots words she spoke just the other night. He’s never raised a hand to her, despite his right, but Kenna feels slapped nonetheless. He takes a step forward, pointing a finger at her, eyes blazing blue fire. “What have I ever done but give you everything you asked for, loved you the best way I know how?”

“You love me the best way I know how,” she shouts. Someone might hear but in the palace keeping a secret is practically impossible anyway. “I ride you, I move your hips over me, I guide your fingers, your tongue. You use my body but not yours and I-“

“Not all of us have as much experience with the art of love as others, wife,” he hisses. “I am not my father and I am not Francis. I did not leave bastards scattered across Europe behind me, nameless and friendless.”

Reality hits Kenna in the face like a the blunt edge of a broadsword. She stumbles back. “Never?”

“Once or twice with a widow my father arranged when I was fifteen but after that-“ he looks away. “I decided the only children I would ever have would be with my wife and there is but one way to ensure that.”

He speaks of his experience with such awkwardness that he can mean only one thing. “So you really…didn’t-dont? Know?”

“Woman, I am loathe to ask for instructions that come from my father’s manual on bedding my bride.” He waves a hand at her then drags it through his dark hair. “You know how to take your own pleasure. I thought that would be enough for now and then-“ he sighs, “I would pick it up as we went along.”

She is smiles at him. “You have been. There’s just so much to learn, Bash. Perhaps if you spoke to Francis.”

“Or perhaps plunged a knife into my own heart.”

She laughs. “Come on. I can show you some of the things I learned I liked in spite of other lovers,” she coaxes. “You mentioned children.”

He swallows so hard that she can hear his throat click. “I did.”

She leans up on her toes and drags her tongue along the stubble on his throat. “Maybe we should work on that then,” she whispers.

He groans and grabs the cheeks of her ass which is her only warning before he lifts her. Her legs wrap around his waist and he holds her up higher even than his own head.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hello,” he replies, smiling up at her. She does so like his smiles. Her prince, who in all ways that matter is better than any king.

“Don’t take us to the bed,” she says, shifting against him. “Walk us to a wall.”

A dark eyebrow quirks. “Really.”

She lets go of his neck with one hand to unlace his trousers and pull her shift out of the way. He helps her as best he can without ceasing in his support of her weight and she sighs as she sinks down on his cock. “Really,” she says, humming with pleasure. “Your strength won’t shake the stone like it would the bed tonight.”

“Strength?” His look is predatory and his eyes are bright. He kisses her hard and slams her into the nearest wall. Her whole body jars with the force of the impact and her insides clench tight around his cock.

“Yes,” she moans, pulling him back by his hair so she can better see his face. “Master me.”


End file.
